Miele Dishwasher - Which detergent, rinse aid, salt etc.

10 years ago

We just installed a older model Miele - La Perla II. I am trying to figure out which dishwasher tabs or powder to use and if we need rinse aid, salt etc. We also have a whole house water softener (kinetico).

Miele tabs or Somat tabs or Finish power ball or Method - I remember reading that Miele tabs were reformulated and may have had some issues with sudsing. Is that still an issue? Which one do you have success with and how much do you use (whole tab or half)

Do I need rinse aid - if yes, which one - Jet dry, Somat, Lemishine? Method?

Salt - Given that I have soft water, do I still need to use DW salt? If so, should I use Miele or Somat? What setting would be better.

Featured Answer

a2gemini

10 years ago

I used to use Cascade but switched to Miele tabs - but not using any rinse aid at this point.

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Comments (6)

deeageaux
10 years ago
I have a Miele La Perla II.

I use Miele tabs and rinse aid.

I would suggest you start there too.

For normal load I use half a tab, for heavily soiled dishes (e,g, burnt cheese and potato casserole dish) I use a full tab.

Perfect results every time. You can use that as your baseline and see if Method from Target work as well or some other brand. Some detect a chemical taste with other rinse aids. Nothing from Miele or Somat.

I would not put in salt at first. If the water coming in is not softened enough the dishwasher will tell you by asking for salt. I use Somat Dishwasher salt.

BTW The whole house water softer can confuse the hard water sensor in the Miele leading to error codes. In that case you turn the built-in water softer off. How to do that is in the instructions.

This post was edited by deeageaux on Thu, Jul 25, 13 at 16:36
rococogurl
10 years ago
I have a whole house softener. I called Miele and had them program the machine to disable the softener. I've never used the DW softener or added salt. Attention should be paid to that or glassware can be etched.

I use Method and Finish Quantum. Half to 1 method (grapefruit rose) for light loads; 1 whole for heavier. Anything heavier or for pots and pans I use a whole Quantum.

Since we are on a septic I try to use more Method than Quantum.

Rinse Aid is Jet Dry, set on 3. With soft water it can also be on 2 or 4 -- they can tell you depending on results. If you get good results with default 3 that's it.

Have used Somat rinse aid and liked it a lot. Also Somat tabs. But I didn't find either of those that much better than the other options which are more accessible and affordable.

Had used several boxes of Miele tabs until they changed the formula and eliminated the handy scoring so the tab could be cut. They are harder to find that the other two, more costly and again, no better IME.

As new things come along I tend to try them out to see if they produce better results. If so, I change.
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The tabs really do a great job (there are some older threads with loads of posts singing their praises!). We used Cascade Complete initially, but Miele came out with the tabs sometime around when we first started using our DW. A bunch of GW'ers tried them and kept raving about them so we decided to give them a try. The CC worked perfectly fine and everything came out spotless. However, the tabs seem to give the loads an extra level of clean and sparkle. Also, the air in the DW just had a fresher quality (odor) after running a load with the tab vs CC. The DW after a CC cleaned load isn't bad, just less fresh smelling. FWIW, some on this forum use 1/2 a tab (and possibly even 1/4 tab?) to clean most loads. Again, my stuff comes out fine with a 1/2 tab, but a full tab just seems to raise that sparkle and clean to another level. It's not overly noticeable, in fact, I thought it was my mind playing tricks on me, but some others here have said the same thing. We don't usually run our DW every day, so I like the sense of security (that everything will get clean) that using a full tab gives. Last night I had a pretty empty DW, but one of those few items was a stinky plastic food container that would have been quite foul smelling by morning let alone this evening, so I ran the DW before bed instead of waiting, with a 1/2 tab and everything came out great. PS there were some posters who had trouble with grit (undisolved soap powder) build up in their rack glides from using Ecover so you might want to do a search for those threads discussing that.
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I have the G2830 LaPerla similar to the Excella. Detergents: I alternate and use a different one each week. I use powder - Electrasol with chlorine bleach(non enzyme), or Cascade Complete(enzyme). I had a disaster with Seventh Generation powder which left grit all over everything including the insides of the dw. I use Liquid Gels - Cascade Complete Gel. I don't use Electrasol Gel because it left a film all over everything. I use tabs - Miele tabs (1/2 to full tab depending on soil level), or Electrasol Red ball tabs, or Electrasol tabs with Jet dry, or Cascade Action Pacs or Electrasol Gel pacs. No problem with any of these. When using Gels I set the detergent selector to Liquid. When using Tabs I keep the detergent selector set to powder. Most powders, tabs, gels and pacs contain enzymes. Electrasol tabs and Gel pacs contain enzymes. Electrasol powder and Gel in the bottle do not. Finish/Electrasol has released their Quantum tab to the USA, although I haven't been able to find it in stores where I live. Rinse Aid: I use Jet dry Green apple with vinegar, I use Jet dry turbo, I use Miele Rinse Aid. I alternate when filling the dispenser. All of these work the same. Salt: I use Somat salt or Miele salt. Both work the same. My Dw measures the water hardness when filling as does the Excella. Like PQ said you can find your hardness in the settings menu. If the DW needs salt I think it will ask for it and if the water is consistently below 4 it won't ask. The softener adjusts the the hardness automatically and only softens the water to the extent it needs to during each fill. Between May and October my water hardness was averaging 19 gpg and the Dw performed the softener step(periodically performed before the first prewash, to regenerate the softener) every other week while asking for salt at least once. Now the hardness is down to 2gpg and there has been not been any softener step performed nor has it asked for salt.
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aamassther
10 years ago
I have the La Perla II as well. I use Miele rinse aid and salt. I've found that dishes get cleaner with powder, I get superfluous results with Somat powder. I've used Cascade Complete powder with fine results. Somat still has 30% phosphates so it gets the edge. Well no comparison really. I have had good results with Miele tabs, but not the others. They don't do a great job on pans. I think it's because there is no soap in the presoak cycle on p&p. I used Finish Quantum in my old Bosch, in fact all I would use. Hated them in the Miele.
SparklingWater
10 years ago
I use Cascade Complete, one tablespoon for full normal load. Our water is medium so I believe my setting is at 6. I use Jet Dry. I did follow the Miele instructions upon receipt and added almost the full box of provided salt.

I'm very pleased with the new Miele.

If you desire to add phosphate, by TSP at your local paint store and add a few grains in on occasion.
herring_maven
10 years ago
We have an older Miele (model G 848) dishwasher that has served us well for ten years come fall. Our local water (Portland, Oregon) is soft.

From some time before we installed the Miele, we had begun to use Ecover powder exclusively, and cannot imagine that we would ever use anything else as long as Ecover is available. We had switched to Ecover from "supermarket brands" (Electrosol and pre-Henkel Dial [Armour], mostly) while we still had our prior dishwasher (Whirlpool), after we learned that the severe etching on glassware washed in our dishwasher was due to chemical action of the dishwashing detergent exacerbated by the softness of our water, rather than (as we had supposed) from mechanical action. We have had not the slightest hint of etching since we switched to Ecover (which, not incidentally, gets our dishes really clean).

Formerly, we preferred Cascade (then called "Cascade Crystal Clear") rinse aid to Jet Dry rinse aid, and we were in the process of reevaluating our options after Cascade was reformulated some years back (conclusion then: Ecos WaveJet seemed closest in performance to the former formulation of Cascade), when a poster here on Garden Web touted Somat. Somat was hard to find, but we sought it out to give it one try, and once we tried it, we were hooked. It is the only rinse aid that we use now.

With our soft water, we never have used salt in our Miele, and it works just fine after almost ten years of heavy use.

Hope this helps.

Miele Dishwasher - Which detergent, rinse aid, salt etc.

a2gemini

Comments (6)

deeageaux

rococogurl

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